The Excellent Lombards (11 page)

Stephen opened his hand, a gray wafer in his palm. “What’s that?” I said.

“A travel alarm clock.”

“You going somewhere?”

“Never know.”

“Because you’re a spy?”

“Everyone really thinks that, don’t they?”

I must have come fully awake then, because I was surprised to find myself in the semi-darkness looking at Stephen’s chiseled handsome face. And more surprising, excitement was blooming in my chest.

“If I was a spy,” he said, holding between his thumb and index finger what looked like a dime, “don’t you think I’d be able to figure out how to put a battery in my clock?”

“That depends.”

“It does?”

“You could maybe truly know how to insert it, but you’re pretending to be clumsy. For your cover.”

“Ah ha,” he said. “You are very clever.”

“Are you afraid, sometimes, in your job?”

I think he was looking at me in his hard, keen way, although I couldn’t be sure. “Yes, very frightened,” he said, “but not for the reasons you imagine.”

“Well,” I said importantly, “maybe a lot of jobs are like apple picking. You could fall and kill yourself but mostly you don’t do that, and instead, you’re working hard all day long and sometimes it is very boring.” I had heard one of the lady apple pickers speaking about the harvest in exactly those terms.

“But guess what?” Stephen said conspiratorially.

“What?”

“When Sherwood shows up, it’s not at all boring because he’s telling you the cell phones of the future will play movies, TV shows, anything you want to see.”

Stephen was speaking about his own brother, Stephen clearly on our side in the future war.

“And,” I said, “Sherwood’s also building a telescope out of aluminum foil, old storm windows, a good pair of binoculars, a rearview mirror, and a cheesecloth.”

Stephen rewarded me with laughter. “Don’t forget,” he said, “it also turns inside out to examine your liver and kidneys.”

“Reversible,” I said.

“Plus,” Stephen said, “it’s a cell phone.”

We both began to laugh and pretty soon we couldn’t stop. What we’d said about Sherwood wasn’t even that far-fetched. We covered our mouths, heads to the table, our laughter coming in snorts through our noses. Were we maybe on Sherwood’s side as well as my father’s? I wasn’t sure. For certain I had never been so happy in the middle of the night, in the moment falling in love with Stephen, although I wouldn’t have called it that. I said, “You should stay here. You shouldn’t ever leave.”

That idea made him sober up. “I shouldn’t?” he asked, as if I were the one to decide.

Supposing he had children with Gloria: I suddenly could see that they wouldn’t necessarily have to be our rivals. Because they’d be so much younger they could stay on as our workers. They wouldn’t be owners or partners, but reliable hired girls and boys. It seemed to me that William and I had just made those future children a generous offer. No Lombard should have to leave the farm for any reason.

Of all the surprising things that Stephen said to me that night, the last question took the prize. He said, “Why do you think May Hill prays to the photograph of her nephew?”

“What?” I said. My face was at once hot.

“Are you going to be a writer?” he asked.

“No.”

“You aren’t?”

“I’m going to be a farmer.”

“A farmer, eh? You should maybe think about writer.”

I shook my head furiously, saying, “William could put that battery in your clock. It would be so easy, nothing to it, do you want me to wake him?”

“It’s a tempting offer, but, between you and me, the CIA is testing me with this problem. I’m sure, pretty sure, I’ll be able to solve it.”

Another wave, such heat, Stephen trusting me with his secret. Plus, it was dawning on me, past my blazing face and into my mind, that he’d somehow read my story about May Hill. Which for one thing was more evidence of his occupation. The interview was information for his
files
. I felt as if I might faint and in order not to I stared at him. He definitely looked like a Lombard, the long nose and the square chin proof, but he also resembled a Japanese emperor, somewhere along the line an impurity sealing his beauty. He was the most handsome spy in the world.

I said, “Isn’t Gloria worried about you?” I was still thinking,
He read my story
.

He didn’t hear my question because he was saying, “Even though this clock doesn’t work it’s probably safe to say it’s time for us to go to bed. Don’t you turn into something unattractive and impossible if you fail to get eight hours of sleep?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well then, Francie, good night.”

“But I don’t really want to go to bed.”

“We can have a standing date, every night at—what time is it?” He squinted at the microwave clock. “Two in the morning! Every night at just this minute I’ll meet you right here.”

He probably didn’t mean it. He was living with Gloria and he wasn’t. He stayed in our house although it didn’t belong to him. He was soon going to float off into the world, a man who himself hadn’t been able to be a farmer. He was someone who didn’t always know what time it was. Plus the travel alarm clock was too hard for him to understand. I started to wonder, as I got back into my bunk, as I tried to go to sleep—if a place might make you more than you were. Was that possible? The puzzle was like a dread story problem. And then, without that place, say you lost it, or couldn’t get back to it, or couldn’t stay there for long, it could turn out that you really weren’t much of anyone.

9.

Winner and Loser

T
hose of us who were especially interested in preparing for the Geography Bee stayed after school two afternoons a week for more intense drills, Mrs. Kraselnik having to do little to twist the arms of the smart boys to join in, for they were in love with her, too. Her goal undoubtedly was to try to bring them up to our level, Amanda’s and mine, so we would have serious competition. We knew that Mrs. Kraselnik loved us best not because she obviously had pets but because we were the most lovable, that is to say, I was most and best. I heard my mother say that Barbara may have regretted bringing the bee to our school, that the fevered Lombard cousins in their dead heat were probably driving her over the bend. The error of that statement was an embarrassment to the speaker, poor Nellie Lombard out of her element.

Mrs. Kraselnik for certain had rare gifts, her cool beauty and her excellent low voice only two of her many teaching tools. I later understood that in our day-to-day work she somehow made Amanda and me feel that together we were a great force, and separately we were special in a way that required no comparison. When Amanda was excused every day after lunch so she could walk up the street to sixth-grade math, Mrs. Kraselnik allowed me to sit in the quiet corner and read a difficult book or work on my memoirs. If we were both raising our hands with equal urgency she called on someone else. We were both enlisted to be mentors for students who needed extra help, the only class members accorded that honor.

A week or so before our class bee, that long-anticipated night, a fight broke out on the playground, a fourth-grade boy beaten up because he was for Bill Clinton. After lunch, it seemed that Mrs. Kraselnik was looking at me especially when she began to talk about the purpose of life. We were doing a tour of Europe and in particular Spain, our teacher more imposing than usual in a black bolero jacket with red trim, and black gaucho pants, and tall black boots. “Why,” she asked, standing before us, “why, boys and girls, are we on this earth? What in the world are we doing here?”

No one had ever asked us that kind of question. Even Amanda didn’t know the answer. “What’s all this for?” Mrs. Kraselnik sounded almost angry, as if our ignorance, our lack of curiosity on the subject, was unforgivable, as if she couldn’t stand to think of our carelessness. Not one of us ventured an opinion, no one in fact saying anything, all of us a blank.

She pierced each of us with her gaze. She said finally, “Boys and girls, we are here to put good in the world.”

That was it? She was again looking very hard at me. For what seemed like a full minute she wasn’t just looking at me, no, she was glaring. Had I done something wrong? Or was I going to misbehave in the future, Mrs. Kraselnik an oracle? It was as if she wanted Mary Frances Lombard, more than any other student, to understand the simple instruction. Even though there was nothing to her statement she repeated it. “We are here only—only to put good in the world.” She clutched her notebook to her chest, her lips pressed firmly together. “You must,” she said, “you must always, always remember this.” I gazed back at her with all my heart, hoping she knew I would never forget her message.

At home in those weeks before the bee I’d started to notice something peculiar. My father quizzed me, always discussing the possible answers in depth, both of us poring over the maps that detailed imports/exports, religion, migration, air currents, the landscape beneath the oceans, endangered species, song and dance, painting and theater, oil, gas, coal, diamond deposits, all the spices of life, and the remarkable flux in time and space. Now and then he’d say, “Just think how much you know! That Mrs. Kraselnik! It’s amazing how much you’ve absorbed in such a short time, what a virtual encyclopedia you are.”

That pleased me.

But then he’d say, “The reward is right here, Marlene, in your knowledge.” For no reason that anyone could remember Marlene had always been my father’s pet name for me. “It doesn’t matter, you know, if you don’t win. That doesn’t matter, not a whit. You’ve already won by knowing all that you know.”

Those remarks made no sense. I hadn’t won, couldn’t possibly have won since the big night had not yet occurred.

My mother, who had always kept track of my studies, was strangely uninterested in my preoccupation. When I asked her if she’d quiz me she’d find an excuse not to, or she’d say I already knew enough to do just fine. William wasn’t exactly indifferent, and he did put his time in, firing off the questions and getting involved in the answers, but he, too, seemed not to care about the final result. He lay on his top bunk saying, “I never liked competitions,” as if all of his experience was behind him. I pointed out that if I won, Mrs. Kraselnik would spend many sessions a week preparing me and the participating sixth, seventh, and eighth graders for the county competition. If I won up in Madison, I’d then take a written qualifying test to ensure that I was championship material before the event in Washington, DC. If I was even a third-place winner, even if I was not national champion, I would win thousands of dollars in scholarship money.

William said, “If that’s what you want to know about, Frankie, about geography, I guess that’s okay. I guess that’s good.”

“Geography,” I said, “is at the heart of every subject. For your information.”

Every day Mrs. Kraselnik had a different way of explaining the importance of our overarching study. “Everything we know and are, boys and girls, begins with the land in your community. Think. Do you live near a river? In a desert? Do you live in the mountains? Where do you get your food, your water? How far away is your school, your church? Are there people like you where you live or are you a minority? Who”—she paused, moving her tongue along her demure upper lip—“is your tribe?”

Kyle Covell laughed and called out, “I’m not in a tribe!”

That sent us all fluttering around the room, to the dictionaries on the
LANGUAGE
!
shelf, and to the computers in the back to define the word
tribe
, and to think how or if we belonged to one.

One morning Mrs. Kraselnik said what I was already well aware of. Among her other talents, as I intimated, she was a mind reader. She said, “Do you understand that everything about the place where you live determines Who You Are?” Her flank was against her desk as she looked sternly at each of us. “Who You Are,” she said again. “You would not be who you are if you did not live right here, in this town, in this county, in this state, and in this time.”

“Okay,” was all William said, when I tried to replicate her speeches.

It was Gloria who set the actual problem before me. I was at the cottage one afternoon, having offered her the opportunity to quiz me.

What state does not experience frequent tornadoes? Florida or Iowa?

The Maldives are located off the southeast coast of what country on mainland Asia?

Which New England state has more forested land? Maine or Vermont?

“Do you and Amanda quiz each other?” Gloria first asked me. “Do you study together?”

“No!” I said.

“No?” We were sitting cross-legged in her living room, on her hard, bare floor. “Mary Frances?” she said, in an odd warning tone.

“What?”

“I want to ask you something.” The beating of my heart, for some reason, sped up. She said, “How will you feel if you win?”

What kind of question was that? The answer was: Elated. Triumphant. Victorious.
I will feel victorious
. She saw she needed to elaborate. “If you win and Amanda doesn’t?” Gloria with her long blond braids and her enormous gray eyes behind her glasses said something more. She said, “Do you understand that it can be harder to be the winner, harder to win than to lose?”